On slop

"Only entropy comes easy."
Anton Chekhov

"We are all confounded by what we believe life is. What we believe we are. What we believe we are capable of. And what we believe we are allowed to do. We work so hard to pin ourselves down. There's no shame in letting some of it go."
Mark Ellison, Building

It's Merriam-Webster's word of the year (last year).

It evokes unkind gruel ladled out in a 19th-century London orphanage or a 1970s school cafeteria. (Though to be fair, Key West has a more cheerful association.)

There's a purist temptation to assign the derision to anything touched by AI. But if we allow ourselves a moment to get real, we can recognize that slop isn't so new.

Human beings have been remarkably prolific slop-makers for a long time. You needn't look further than a gas station hot dog, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or maybe something even closer to home...

Maybe the real work is reckoning with the automaton within. That part of us that can so easily dial up rote filler, avoid an unpleasant "we can do better" conversation, and lazily slump toward "done."

So, tipping our hats to last year's lexical champ, our 2026 rubric is simple: create content with heart and guts, stuff worth people's time...and keep pushing.